THE COUNTRY-SIDE: SUSSEX. 89 
ward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles as they 
are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break 
the force of the draught along the hill-side, which would 
have caused too fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut 
of poles meeting in a cone, wrapped round with rough 
canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short ladder, 
he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent 
half double, and fitted to a handle in the same way as 
a spade. This was for sifting charcoal when burned, 
and separating the small from the larger pieces. Every 
now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and 
drifted along; it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick 
smell of smothered wood coal, to me not disagreeable, 
but to some people so annoying that they have been 
known to leave their houses and abandon a locality 
where charcoal-burning was practised. Dim memories 
of old days come crowding round me, invisible to him, 
to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who 
met with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests or 
medizval days, of the noble knights and dames whom 
the rude charcoal-burners guided to their castles thiough 
trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely 
is there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in 
some way or other mention these men, whose occupation 
fixed them in the wildcrnesses which of yore stretched 
between cultivated places. I looked at the modern 
charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good- 
looking, upright, and distinctly superior in general style 
to the common runof working men. He’spoke without 
broad accent and used correct language; he was well 
educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, 
and had an independent expression ; a very civil, intel- 
ligent, and straightforward man. No rude charcoal-" 
burner of old days this. We stood close to the highway 
